Sculptor exhibits at Image Factory
Milk Clouds, the latest exhibition at the Image Factory, is the first local production for Santiago Cal. Now twenty-seven years old, Cal lived in Belmopan for many years before moving to the U.S. with his family in 1986. And from his studio in Nebraska, he has created sculptures he lovingly calls heads and ticks. As you are about to see, Cal’s work will certainly leave a heavy impression on the mind.
Santiago Cal, Sculptor
“Specifically, the milk clouds came from a book I was reading by Gaston Bachelard, who is a French philosopher. It’s on poetic imagination and reverie. He talked about the secret blackness of milk, which is only apparent to those who can look at milk and see beyond what it is, it’s colour, and realise it’s opaqueness. So that thought really interested me and made me think about things that exist but are seen like thoughts. And thoughts just emanate from your head and they shift. You can’t say I’m thinking about this right now because you’re not thinking about that right now, it shifts. So I thought clouds are the same way. Clouds shift like that, so that’s where I came up with milk clouds.”
Jose Sanchez
“What goes through your mind when you’re making this? In your mind what are you creating?”
Santiago Cal
“That’s a difficult question to answer, but I guess the way I approach these heads, it that I try to make them devoid of identifiable characteristics like gender, or saying this head is so and so, or is a portrait of me or my mom or my father or whatever. I just try to have them be anonymous individuals, so the way I guess carve their identities, is by giving them subtle characteristics like elongated heads, like the one in the back where this cranium is just sort of bulbous. Or this one here that’s sleeping that has a scar on this lip, which come from a memory from when I was a child here in Belize.
Jose Sanchez
“What about ticks, tell me a little bit about those?”
Santiago Cal
“Well the ticks came from the idea of obviously parasites. I’ve been very interested in parasites and how they function and what they mean and how in many levels how a parasite can be inside of you and you can’t do anything about it. It’s kind of like that same thing we do to ourselves with a thought also, whether it’s anger, love or hate, any kind of emotion or mental conditions. We’re still sore of self parasitic, we can’t get rid of it, it’s inside us.”
Jose Sanchez
“When people come here, and after they see what you’ve done, what do you expect them to think when they see it, or when they leave?”
Santiago Cal
“I don’t know, you know. I hope they think something completely different than I’m thinking because that’s kind of the excitement. So far I’ve had good reactions, people come in and look on it say all kinds of thins you know, and I like that, it’s very important to me that they’re thinking too. I ask them to work, to think about what they see and not just get something and answer and say “Oh! I get it,” and walk away.”
The exhibit opens tonight and runs through April twenty-seventh. The pieces are on sale and prices range from one thousand five hundred to three thousand dollars.
